Decoding levels of representation in reading: A representational similarity approach

Fischer‐Baum, Simon; Bruggemann, Dorothy; Gallego, Ivan Felipe; Li, Donald S.P.; Tamez, Emilio R.

doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2017.02.017

Cited by 40 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…Significant semantic priming effects were found in this region in a visual lexical decision task 19 , but not in a similar paradigm with a semantic oddball detection task 3 or a naming task 4 . The effects that semantically related word pairs showed more similar activity patterns than semantically unrelated ones in the VWFA were found to be marginally significant in one recent study 7 , but not in an earlier study 20 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 60%

“…The significant semantic effects observed here, in comparison to previous studies, are also likely to be driven by the explicit semantic tasks we used. For tasks where (deep) semantic processing was not necessary such as lexical decision, semantic effects tended not to be consistent in the VWFA 3 , 4 , 7 . To our knowledge, there was only one study reporting both orthographic and semantic effects in the primed lexical decision task in the posterior fusiform gyrus 19 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Three control RDMs were constructed. The visual pixelwise RDM measured the pixelwise overlap of the binary silhouette images of word pairs 7 , 38 . The co-occurrence RDM measured how likely the two words would appear together in a 5-word window in texts and was based on summed counts of co-occurrence frequency for each word pair within five words in the Chinese Web 5-gram Corpus ( https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2010T06 ), which contains about 883 billion word tokens extracted from Chinese Web pages.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One possible explanation for these inconsistent findings of semantic effects in the VWFA might be related to the multidimensional organization of the semantic space 21 – 23 . Previous studies examined semantic effects by contrasting conditions of strong and weak semantical relatedness, with relatedness quantified from subjective association strength 3 or computational linguistics 7 . Nevertheless, concepts can be related to each other in very different ways.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Representational similarity analysis reveals task-dependent semantic influence of the visual word form area

Wang

et al. 2018

Sci Rep

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Access to semantic information of visual word forms is a key component of reading comprehension. In this study, we examined the involvement of the visual word form area (VWFA) in this process by investigating whether and how the activity patterns of the VWFA are influenced by semantic information during semantic tasks. We asked participants to perform two semantic tasks - taxonomic or thematic categorization - on visual words while obtaining the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI responses to each word. Representational similarity analysis with four types of semantic relations (taxonomic, thematic, subjective semantic rating and word2vec) revealed that neural activity patterns of the VWFA were associated with taxonomic information only in the taxonomic task, with thematic information only in the thematic task and with the composite semantic information measured by word2vec in both semantic tasks. Furthermore, the semantic information in the VWFA cannot be explained by confounding factors including orthographic, low-level visual and phonological information. These findings provide positive evidence for the presence of both orthographic and task-relevant semantic information in the VWFA and have significant implications for the neurobiological basis of reading.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 60%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Representational similarity analysis reveals task-dependent semantic influence of the visual word form area

Wang

et al. 2018

Sci Rep

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“…An alternative approach to evaluating the activation of semantic and phonological representations in different brain regions during reading tasks is the use of representational similarity analysis (RSA) fMRI (Fischer-Baum et al, 2017 ; Zhao et al, 2017 ). This approach can identify the type of information about written words represented in different cortical regions on the basis of the similarity of the fine-grained patterns of activity to different words.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual Differences in the Neural and Cognitive Mechanisms of Single Word Reading

Fischer‐Baum

Kook

Lee

et al. 2018

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

Self Cite

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Written language is a human invention that our brains did not evolve for. Yet, most research has focused on finding a single theory of reading, identifying the common set of cognitive and neural processes shared across individuals, neglecting individual differences. In contrast, we investigated variation in single word reading. Using a novel statistical method for analyzing heterogeneity in multi-subject task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we clustered readers based on their brain’s response to written stimuli. Separate behavioral testing and neuroimaging analysis shows that these clusters differed in the role of the sublexical pathway in processing written language, but not in reading skill. Taken together, these results suggest that individuals vary in the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in word reading. In general, neurocognitive theories need to account not only for what tends to be true of the population, but also the types of variation that exist, even within a neurotypical population.

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Lexical learning in a new language leads to neural pattern similarity with word reading in native language

Chen

et al. 2018

Human Brain Mapping

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Previous neuroimaging studies have suggested similar neural activations for word reading in native and second languages. However, such similarities were qualitatively determined (i.e., overlapping activation based on traditional univariate activation analysis). In this study, using representational similarity analysis and an artificial language training paradigm, we quantitatively computed cross-language neural pattern similarity to examine the modulatory effect of proficiency in the new language. Twenty-four native Chinese speakers were trained to learn 30 words in a logographic artificial language for 12 days and scanned while performing a semantic decision task after 4-day training and after 12-day training. Results showed that higher proficiency in the new language was associated with higher cross-language pattern similarity in select regions of the reading network.

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Decoding levels of representation in reading: A representational similarity approach

Cited by 40 publications

References 69 publications

Representational similarity analysis reveals task-dependent semantic influence of the visual word form area

Representational similarity analysis reveals task-dependent semantic influence of the visual word form area

Individual Differences in the Neural and Cognitive Mechanisms of Single Word Reading

Lexical learning in a new language leads to neural pattern similarity with word reading in native language

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